December 1990. I was a senior at Cornell (well, really a junior), and the Cornell Engineer magazine published a piece on wind energy that I was involved with. That issue has been sitting in a drawer — or rather, stored as a scan that I apparently fed into the scanner upside down — for the better part of 36 years. I finally rotated the pages, posted the PDF to https://github.com/vincentjzimmer/Documents/blob/master/Wind_Energy_Cornell_Engineer_December_1990.pdf, and thought a few words were warranted.
Wind energy in 1990 was a niche topic in a way that's almost hard to remember now. The wind farms of Altamont Pass in California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm had been operating for about a decade — the first commercial-scale wind farm in the U.S. had come online in 1981 — but the economics were marginal and the technology was adolescent. The phrase "renewable energy" had not yet acquired its current ubiquity. Horizontal-axis turbines were winning out over vertical-axis designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrieus_wind_turbine, but the engineering was still very much in flux.
Cornell was a good place to be thinking about this. The College of Engineering had people working on structural dynamics, aerodynamics, and the applied mathematics that underpins both. The Cornell Engineer was student-run and gave us latitude to write about topics that weren't necessarily part of our coursework.
I graduated in early 1992 and spent the subsequent 30+ years doing systems software — firmware, UEFI, formal verification, very far from wind turbines. But there's a through-line that I think about occasionally: the engineering problems that look straightforward from a distance become deeply interesting at the interface of physics and constraints. Wind turbines in 1990 were a blade-structure-aerodynamics-economics system, the kind of coupled-domain problem that doesn't submit to clean reductionism. Firmware is a CPU-platform-specification-security system with the same character.
The other through-line is time. Wind energy from a marginal 1990s technology to >10% of global electricity generation https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2025/ took about 35 years of sustained engineering, policy, and economics. A lot of the infrastructure that enabled it — power electronics, grid-scale storage, turbine materials — was being worked out in parallel by people who weren't waiting for a clean solution to arrive. That's also how firmware security works, and how formal verification of systems software is working right now.
The upside-down scan is an apt metaphor. Sometimes the record needs a 180° rotation to be readable.
And it looks like some things don't change, either.
